Having Trouble With Your Video Ad?

They said it would be easy, right? They said the traffic and engagement would be EPIC, right? Just throw up a video! If a picture is worth a thousand words, a 5 second video ad is worth a thousand bucks! Just throw it on YouTube, post it to Facebook and watch those leads fall over themselves trying to jump into your funnel!

But then your ad got 10,000 impressions, with a reach of 8,000, and of those, only about 1,200 made it past the 3 second mark.

And you’ve generated no leads.

No ROI.

Why? Well, there are several reasons why your video ad may not have generated the results you were looking for. Hopefully, sharing a couple of insights with you will help you get a lot more out of your next video ad!

It’s not about you, it’s about your audience.

If you’re producing a video to promote yourself or your business, it’s natural to want to tell your audience how great you and your product are. But marketing isn’t about you and your product. It’s about your audience! Your video needs to speak to your audience’s pain points and offer a solution to their needs. It needs to be relatable to them, it needs to engage and excite them, get their emotions running high. Your campaign strategy must always first identify your audience’s need. In this way you can ensure that your creative targets the need above all else.

The story isn’t compelling.

In his book, “How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market,” Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman asserts that to a very large degree emotion drives purchasing behaviors, and decision making in general. If you’re going to tell a story with your video clip, it needs to have an immediate emotional impact. We’ll give you an example:

We all remember this ad from Thai telecom giant True Move H, in which a young boy is caught stealing medicine for his mother. A nearby shopkeeper pays for the medicine and asks his own daughter to give the boy a bag of soup. Thirty years later, the shopkeeper falls ill and his daughter must sell their home to pay for his care. The pay off comes when the daughter wakes up to find that the hospital bill has been paid in full, with three packs of painkillers and a bag of soup. The thief from the beginning has grown up to be the doctor in charge of the shopkeeper’s care!

I got teary-eyed just now, and all I did was summarize a Thai cell phone commercial! Now your ad doesn’t need to be a 3 minute long mini-film produced by a major production company, but it does need to be impactful if you’re going to tell a story – and what’s a video for, if not to tell a story?

Click on the Contact Us button below to let us know if you need help planning your next video ad campaign!